Category Archives: linux

AceJump 3.0 – jump plugin for IntelliJ platform

If there are nine rabbits on the ground, if you want to catch one, just focus on one.

Jack Ma

When writing code, you want to focus your mental energy on specific task. One of the biggest challenges and time consuming operations is for your editor of choice getting in your way, distracting you from the task at hand. JetBrains Rider has already built-in features to improve your productivity with writing code. Being able to quickly navigate through your code editor, jumping from one class to another, searching through files, getting file structure etc., is helping you save not just time, but also keystrokes.

Built-In features are great (and when used with keyboard – really fast), but you want to take that to another level – you want to jump to any position to any text in code or web editor with simple writing value and selecting where to jump.

I was checking out Jetbrains .NET blog. Khalid Abuhakmeh posted Must Have Jetbrains plugins for ASP.NET Core Developers and AceJump was mentioned.

What is AceJump and what does it do?

AceJump is a plugin for the IntelliJ Platform that lets you jump to any symbol in the editor with just a few keystrokes. Installation is very simple, just follow the guide on Github page.

For example, if I activate AceJump and start writing text in, it will show all occurrences of that word in the open file and define keyboard shortcuts to quickly jump to that word. When pressing f.e. K will put you to ILogger<IndexPageModel> position.

AceJump 3.0 activation
AceJump 3.0 activation

Besides basic navigation, AceJump 3.0 is quite feature rich. Some of really useful main features are:

  • Ergonomic tagging: Tries to minimize finger and eye travel on most common keyboards layouts and languages.
  • Full-text search: If a string is not visible on the screen, AceJump will scroll to the next occurrence.
  • Smart tag rendering: Tags will occupy nearby whitespace if available, rather than block adjacent text.
  • Target mode: Jump and select a full word in one rapid motion.
  • Line Mode: Jump to the first, last, or first non-whitespace character of any line on-screen
  • Word Mode: Jump to the first character of any visible word on-screen in two keystrokes or less.
  • and much more….

I was using only few features in the beginning, but now I am leveraging more and more as it is fast, unobtrusive and powerful to jump around the document.

Let me see it in action

Charl Brothla is getting through features of AceJump 3.0 in this short video below. He shows the main features in action. Code is open-sourced on Github, available here.

Video about using features in AceJump 3.0

Conclusions

AceJump can help you jump really quickly around the editor (without using mouse) and being able to perform additional task, like selecting word after jumping to that location, smart tag rendering and much more.

I would really recommend checking tips section as there are some recommendations, which could help you in the beginning. After using the plugin for some time, must say I am being more productive as I am leveraging the tool for navigation and feels strange using mouse inside code editor.

Definitely going into my dev toolbox.